Watch out for radio and television broadcast transmitters, and don't ever drive under a cell tower.

I intentionally don't have a smartphone, mainly because they are getting hacked too fast.

An old fashioned cell phone is sufficient if you only want to make a phone call in case of emergency...
and when the accumulator pack eventually had died, I just tied that old cell phone
to a cute 4V lead gel accumulator by making creative use of cable straps.

BTW: I'm still trying to get used to having more than 40 characters
per line of text available when posting in this forum.

;---

My problem with the modern stuff is, that it's powerful indeed,
but it emanates some odd "Mickey Mouse smell".

Joke:
A design team is out to build a new smart phone,
and they had spent a year with implementing some neat features.

Three days before the deadline of the project,
one of them engineers eventually says:
"Hey, what we are building there appears to be sort of a cell phone...
I mean... aren't users supposed to be able to make phone calls with it ?"

Suddenly, there is an odd outburst of activity in the design team...

// In the "good old days", a phone was just a phone for making phone calls.

The signal pulsing in the cell-phone communication method is a lot more damaging to DNA and nerves than a continuous power transmission like you get from an FM broadcast transmitter. It's also a minimum of eight times the frequency of FM broadcast. Our FM and TV transmitters are on a mountain overlooking the valley, about 25 miles from here in a straight line, and there's no population at all within at least a couple of miles from the towers. Cell-phone towers are everywhere of course; but if you put the phone up to your head, your brain is getting a lot more radiation from your phone than you're getting from the nearby tower. Driving (hopefully you're a passenger if you're talking on the phone while in the car) is the worst, because the phone is putting out the most power when it's seeking the next cell site to transfer to as you keep moving. Even at home, if you have a tower only 100 meters away and you're holding a laptop computer with WiFi connection on your lap, the intensity of radiation you're getting from the laptop is twice what you're getting from the tower, because of the distance and the inverse-square law, and because of the "squashed donut" radiation pattern the antennas on the tower are designed to produce. Smart power meters are probably a greater health risk than cell-phone towers are. Some kids can't handle WiFi in the classroom. They get headaches or even break out, without knowing why, and the problem goes away after the WiFi is turned off. There's lots more. I should find and post the best of the links.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

It's well worth distinguishing electromagnetic radiation from ionising radiation. Anyone using the plain word "radiation" to refer to EM is probably in a state of sin. Say "photons" instead and it's much less scary.

The human brain dissipates about 12 Watts, whereas the strongest Wifi booster puts out 1 Watt, in a symmetric pattern, and the usual case is more like a quarter of that. So, I'd say, nothing to worry about.

Carry on!

No "smart" phone here either. I don't use a toilet as a salad bowl, so why would I use a telephone as a computer? I actually revel in alone time—it gives me an opportunity to think about things. Hard to do that when an electronic gadget is stealing my time from me as people text me with inane cr*p. I really don't care if your girl friend just slapped you because you mouthed off to her.


I concur. All I see these days are people of all ages stumbling down the street, head at a 45 degree angle, with their eyes glued to a "smart" phone screen. There's a classic video of a woman tripping and falling into a decorative pool in a shopping mall while monkeying with her phone—she wasn't aware of her surroundings. I've been in restaurants where guys and gals are seated in booths, fixated on their phones and neither talking to the other or even making eye contact. Some date!

As for the bozos using their phones while driving an automobile...

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

True, it is not ionizing. Ionizing radiation is not what's causing the damage. Nor is heating. Further, the peaks are what's significant, not the average power which you would use to determine heating as with a microwave oven. Heating is not the issue at all. Here are some good links listed by increasing length, shortest ones first:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOSbSur ... be&t=3m30s (less than five minutes of Dr. Devra Davis testifying in court, followed by Dr.Havas telling about WiFi in schools)
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHnouzKyU0 ten minutes, Dr. Maret, MD - unsafe cell-phone and wireless standards for children
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNNSztN7wJc one-hour lecture on cell-phone dangers from Dr. Devra Davis at National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). I was mildly skeptical until I saw this video. Dr. Davis (who also did not initially believe there was any danger) presents loads of data from studies showing the damage cell phones do to the brain and other parts of the body they are kept near for significant periods of time. Children are much more susceptible though, and they recommend that children not be allowed any cell-phone use at all.
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... NFdZVeXw7M Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe, MD - Electromagnetic Radiation, Health and Children 2014, 70-minute lecture
  
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWRdkx ... e=youtu.be 140-minute interview with scientist and microwave expert Barrie Trower, regarding the dangers and lethality of microwave technology (2010)

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Looks like this is one of those things where one can find evidence either way, and it's a question of quality of evidence, and the balance of risk and convenience. Normally I'd err on the side of caution, but wifi is enormously convenient! (I also use a cordless phone. And indeed I have an ancient microwave oven, so if I turn up one day with a cooked brain, you'll know why.)

Pfft! I don't even own a microwave oven. (Well actually I do; it's a broken one I've been meaning for years to strip for parts).

BTW, I do apologise for my flippant tone - for me, these health risks are theoretical and implausible, but I do see that if someone is suffering, it's serious, whatever the cause.

Unlike the lectures that I beg people to watch, the link above has no graphs, charts, scans, statistics, diagnoses, health histories, case studies, or anything like that. I just says, "Don't worry about it. There's no problem." I know it takes time to watch these, which is not convenient.


My guess is that the cordless phone communicating with a land line in the next room is not so bad, because the wavelength is much longer (at least the one we had years ago was well below 200MHz—maybe modern ones are in the GHz range), and it probably does not pulse like WiFi and cell phones do.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

In the EU, we tend to use DECT cordless phones, which are rather like mobile phones and rather like Wifi. AIUI, it was intended as a cellular standard and was adapted for home use.

It does take time to watch a lot of presentations, or to read a lot of scientific papers. Personally, I have a degree of trust in public scientists doing that for me. I know that some people will find that impossible.

I don't seek to persuade you Garth, or to change anyone's mind - I seek only to note the existence and credibility of the other point of view. Life's too short to try to study and debunk every claim. We tend to make up our minds first - me included - and accumulate sources which support us.

I'm currently reading this book:
"Electric UFOs: Fireballs, Electromagnetics and Abnormal States" (Albert Budden)

The title is a reference to the idea that EM pollution messes with the brain causing hallucinations that are interpreted as UFO contact. The EM pollution can also be the result of tectonic movement, which is why there are "hot spots" for UFO sightings.

He also says EM pollution causes food allergies, various other kinds of hyper-sensitivity, and is linked to leukemia.

It is not as simple as measuring the distance to the source, as Garth says. Terrain complicates the issue considerably. Also, different sources interfere with each other. You can have hot spots, and it is difficult to predict where these will be. Also, it makes a lot of difference how much time is spent in the hot spot. An example is a case where a housewife had symptoms, but her husband didn't and thought she was making this stuff up, but it was because he was away from the house all day at work.

The book was written in 1998, before cell phones were invented. He is mostly talking about power lines, television towers, ham-radio towers, etc..

I haven't finished the book, so I won't comment further on what it is about or how good it is.

s/invented/ubiquitous/

Mike B.

It almost seems that for every argument that seeks to prove that close-in exposure to high frequency radiation will kill you/maim you/hurt your dog/wilt the flowers, etc., there is an opposing argument that proposes that it's all Chicken Little reaction to a theoretical risk.

During my service in the U.S. Navy, I was well aware of the dangers of direct exposure to the microwave output of radar sets, especially the radar used on gun directors, which operated at many gigahertz and was powerful enough to take out seagulls at hundreds of feet. However, these were sources operating at tens to hundreds of kilowatts of radiated power—the air search radar on our ship radiated 750 KW at full power! A modern cell phone's radiation is minuscule in comparison. Ditto for the output of wifi routers, medical telemetry systems (I've been on those a few times), and a host of other gadgets that generate and, by design, radiate RF energy. These devices, especially cell phones, have been commonplace since the 1990s, and a lot of data regarding radiation hazards has been gathered and analyzed.

At this time, I tend to brand it as a theoretical risk, as science has not been able to conclusively link daily exposure to low-level RF radiation with known health maladies. Extended studies done during the latter 1990s, especially in Sweden, where there was considerable concern about X-ray and other radiation emanating from the CRTs in radar 'scopes and large video monitors (both of which use very high secondary anode voltages to propel the electrons into the screen corners), failed to establish any link between said radiation and health issues. The conclusion was the radiation levels were too low to be a concern.

As Ed noted, there are bound to be exceptions in the population. However, they are sufficiently rare as to be dismissed as aberrations, not commonplace occurrences.

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I think that I understand the gist of Garth's linked videos ... the documented hazard is not all about the intensity, but the combination of proximity, frequency, and pulse signature ... I say, as I light up my tenth cigarette of the day ...

Mike B.